Permutation City Read online

  And it was good just to feel healthy and vigorous, to be free of the arthritis, the aches and cramps and chills, the shortness of breath he could still remember vividly. Anything more seemed too easy, too arbitrary. Any Copy could become a Hollywood Adonis in an instant. And any Copy could outrace a bullet, lift a building, move a planet from its course.

  Thomas opened his eyes, reached out and touched the surface of the mirror, aware that he was avoiding making a decision. But one thing still bothered him.

  Why had Durham chosen him? The man might be deluded – but he was also intelligent and rational on some level. Of all the Copies whose insecurities he might have tried to exploit, why choose one with a watertight set-up, secure hardware, a well-managed trust fund? Why choose a target who appeared to have absolutely nothing to fear?

  Thomas felt the vertigo returning. It had been sixty-five years. Not one newspaper story or police report had mentioned his name; no database search, however elaborate, could link him to Anna. Nobody alive could know what he’d done – least of all a fifty-year-old ex-psychiatric patient from the other side of the world.

  Even the man who’d committed the crime was dead. Thomas had seen him cremated.

  Did he seriously think that Durham’s offer of sanctuary was some elaborately coded euphemism for not dredging up the past? Blackmail?

  No. That was ludicrous.

  So why not make a few calls, and have the poor man seen to? Why not pay for him to be treated by the best Swiss neurosurgeon (who’d verify the procedure in advance, on the most sophisticated set of partial brain models … )

  Or did he believe there was a chance that Durham was telling the truth? That he could run a second Copy, in a place nobody could reach in a billion years?

  The terminal chimed. Thomas said, “Yes?”

  Heidrich had taken over from Löhr; sometimes the shifts seemed to change so fast that it made Thomas giddy. “You have a meeting of the Geistbank board in five minutes, sir.”

  “Thank you, I’ll be right down.”

  Thomas checked his appearance in the mirror. He said, “Comb me.” His hair was made passably tidy, his complexion less pale, his eyes clear; certain facial muscles were relaxed, and others tightened. His suit required no attention; as in life, it could not be wrinkled.

  He almost laughed, but his newly combed expression discouraged it. Expediency, honesty, complacency, insanity. It was a tightrope walk. He was ninety years old by one measure, eighty-five-and-a-half by another – and he still didn’t know how to live.

  On his way out, he picked up his Confidence & Optimism and poured it on the carpet.

  Chapter 9

  (Rip, tie, cut toy man)

  June 2045

  Paul took the stairs down, and circled the block a few times, hoping for nothing more than to forget himself for a while. He was tired of having to think about what he was, every waking moment. The streets around the building were familiar enough, not to let him delude himself, but at least to allow him to take himself for granted.

  It was hard to separate fact from rumor, but he’d heard that even the giga-rich tended to live in relatively mundane surroundings, favoring realism over power fantasies. A few models-of-psychotics had reportedly set themselves up as dictators in opulent palaces, waited on hand and foot, but most Copies aimed for an illusion of continuity. If you desperately wanted to convince yourself that you were the same person as your memories suggested, the worst thing to do would be to swan around a virtual antiquity (with mod cons), pretending to be Cleopatra or Ramses II.

  Paul didn’t believe that he “was” his original. He knew he was nothing but a cloud of ambiguous data. The miracle was that he was capable of believing that he existed at all.

  What gave him that sense of identity?

  Continuity. Consistency. Thought following thought in a coherent pattern.

  But where did that coherence come from?

  In a human, or a Copy being run in the usual way, the physics of brain or computer meant that the state of mind at any one moment directly influenced the state of mind that followed. Continuity was a simple matter of cause and effect; what you thought at time A affected what you thought at time B affected what you thought at time C…

  But when his subjective time was scrambled, the flow of cause and effect within the computer bore no relationship whatsoever to the flow of his experience – so how could it be an essential part of it? When the program spelled out his life DBCEA, but it still felt exactly like ABCDE … then surely the pattern was all, and cause and effect were irrelevant. The whole experience might just as well have arisen by chance.

  Suppose an intentionally haywire computer sat for a thousand years or more, twitching from state to state in the sway of nothing but electrical noise. Might it embody consciousness?

  In real time, the answer was: probably not – the probability of any kind of coherence arising at random being so small. Real time, though, was only one possible reference frame; what about all the others? If the states the machine passed through could be rearranged in time arbitrarily, then who could say what kind of elaborate order might emerge from the chaos?

  Paul caught himself. Was that fatuous? As absurd as insisting that every room full of monkeys really did type the complete works of Shakespeare – they just happened to put the letters in a slightly different order? As ludicrous as claiming that every large-enough quantity of rock contained Michelangelo’s David, and every warehouse full of paint and canvas contained the complete works of Rembrandt and Picasso – not in any mere latent form, awaiting some skillful forger to physically rearrange them, but solely by virtue of the potential redefinition of the coordinates of space-time?

  For a statue or a painting, yes, it was a joke. Where was the observer who perceived the paint to be in contact with the canvas, who saw the stone figure suitably delineated by air?

  If the pattern in question was not an isolated object, though, but a self-contained world, complete with at least one observer to join up the dots from within…

  There was no doubt that it was possible. He’d done it. In the final trial of the second experiment, he’d assembled himself and his surroundings – effortlessly – from the dust of randomly scattered moments, from apparent white noise in real time. True, what the computer had done had been contrived, guaranteed to contain his thoughts and perceptions coded into its seemingly aimless calculations. But given a large enough collection of truly random numbers, there was no reason to believe that it wouldn’t include, purely by accident, hidden patterns as complex and coherent as the ones which underlay him.

  And wouldn’t those patterns, however scrambled they might be in real time, be conscious of themselves, just as he’d been conscious, and piece their own subjective world together, just as he had done?

  Paul returned to the apartment, fighting off a sense of giddiness and unreality. So much for forgetting himself; he felt more charged than ever with the truth of his strange nature.

  Did he still want to bale out? No. No! How could he declare that he’d happily wake and forget himself – wake and “reclaim” his life – when he was beginning to glimpse the answers to questions which his original had never even dared to ask?

  Chapter 10

  (Remit not paucity)

  November 2050

  Maria arrived at the café fifteen minutes early – to find Durham already there, seated at a table close to the entrance. She was surprised, but relieved; with the long wait she’d been expecting suddenly canceled, she had no time to grow nervous. Durham spotted her as she walked in; they shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, ordered coffee from the table’s touchscreen menus. Seeing Durham in the flesh did nothing to contradict the impression he’d made by phone: middle-aged, quiet, conservatively dressed; not exactly the archetypical Autoverse junkie.

  Maria said, “I always thought I was the only Autoverse Review subscriber living in Sydney. I’ve been in touch with Ian Summers in Hobart a couple of times, but I never realize
d there was anyone so close.”

  Durham was apologetic. “There’s no reason why you would have heard of me. I’m afraid I’ve always confined myself to reading the articles; I’ve never contributed anything, or participated in the conferences. I don’t actually work in the Autoverse, myself. I don’t have the time. Or the skills, to be honest.”

  Maria absorbed that, trying not to appear too startled. It was like hearing someone admit that they studied chess, but never played the game.

  “But I’ve followed progress in the field very closely, and I can certainly appreciate what you’ve done with A. lamberti. Perhaps even more so than some of your fellow practitioners. I think I see it in a rather broader context.”

  “You mean … cellular automata in general?”

  “Cellular automata, artificial life.”

  “They’re your main interests?”

  “Yes.”

  But not as a participant? Maria tried to imagine this man as a patron of the artificial life scene, magnanimously sponsoring promising young practitioners; Lorenzo the Magnificent to the Botticellis and Michelangelos of cellular automaton theory.

  It wouldn’t wash. Even if the idea wasn’t intrinsically ludicrous, he just didn’t look that rich.

  The coffee arrived. Durham started paying for both of them, but when Maria protested, he let her pay for herself without an argument – which made her feel far more at ease. As the robot trolley slid away, she got straight to the point. “You say you’re interested in funding research that builds on my results with A. lamberti. Is there any particular direction—?”

  “Yes. I have something very specific in mind.” Durham hesitated. “I still don’t know the best way to put this. But I want you to help me … prove a point. I want you to construct a seed for a biosphere.”

  Maria said nothing. She wasn’t even sure that she’d heard him correctly. A seed for a biosphere was terraforming jargon – for all the plant and animal species required to render a sterile, but theoretically habitable planet ecologically stable. She’d never come across the phrase in any other context.

  Durham continued. “I want you to design a pre-biotic environment – a planetary surface, if you’d like to think of it that way – and one simple organism which you believe would be capable, in time, of evolving into a multitude of species, and filling all the potential ecological niches.”

  “An environment? So … you want a Virtual Reality landscape?” Maria tried not to look disappointed. Had she seriously expected to be paid to work in the Autoverse? “With microscopic primordial life? Some kind of … Precambrian theme park, where the users can shrink to the size of algae and inspect their earliest ancestors?” For all her distaste for patchwork VR, Maria found herself almost warming to the idea. If Durham was offering her the chance to supervise the whole project – and the funds to do the job properly – it would be a thousand times more interesting than any of the tedious VR contracts she’d had in the past. And a lot more lucrative.

  But Durham said, “No, please – forget about Virtual Reality. I want you to design an organism, and an environment – in the Autoverse – which would have the properties I’ve described. And forget about Precambrian algae. I don’t expect you to recreate ancestral life on Earth, translated into Autoverse chemistry – if such a thing would even be possible. I just want you to construct a system with … the same potential.”

  Maria was now thoroughly confused. “When you mentioned a planetary surface, I thought you meant a full-scale virtual landscape – a few dozen square kilometers. But if you’re talking about the Autoverse … you mean a fissure in a rock on a sea bed, something like that? Something vaguely analogous to a microenvironment on the early Earth? Something a bit more ‘natural’ than a culture dish full of two different sugars?”

  Durham said, “I’m sorry, I’m not making myself very clear. Of course you’ll want to try out the seed organism in a number of microenvironments; that’s the only way you’ll be able to predict with any confidence that it would actually survive, mutate, adapt … flourish. But once that’s established, I’ll want you to describe the complete picture. Specify an entire planetary environment which the Autoverse could support – and in which the seed would be likely to evolve into higher lifeforms.”

  Maria hesitated. She was beginning to wonder if Durham had any idea of the scale on which things were done in the Autoverse. “What exactly do you mean by a ‘planetary environment’?”

  “Whatever you think is reasonable. Say – thirty million square kilometers?” He laughed. “Don’t have a heart attack; I don’t expect you to model the whole thing, atom by atom. I do realize that all the computers on Earth couldn’t handle much more than a tide pool. I just want you to describe the essential features. You could do that in a couple of terabytes – probably less. It wouldn’t take much to sum up the topography; it doesn’t matter what the specific shape of every mountain and valley and beach is – all you need is a statistical description, a few relevant fractal dimensions. The meteorology, and the geochemistry – for want of a better word – will be a little more complex. But I think you know what I’m getting at. You could summarize everything that matters about a pre-biotic planet with a relatively small amount of data. I don’t expect you to hand over a giant Autoverse grid which contains every atom in every grain of sand.”

  Maria said, “No, of course not.” This was getting stranger by the minute. “But … why specify a whole ‘planet’ – in any form?”

  “The size of the environment, and the variation in climate and terrain, are important factors. Details like that will affect the number of different species which arise in isolation, and later migrate and interact. They certainly made a difference to the Earth’s evolutionary history. So they may or may not be crucial, but they’re hardly irrelevant.”

  Maria said carefully, “That’s true – but nobody will ever be able to run a system that big in the Autoverse, so what’s the point of describing it? On Earth, the system is that big, we’re stuck with it. The only way to explain the entire fossil record, and the current distribution of species, is to look at things on a planetary scale. Migration has happened, it has to be taken into account. But … in the Autoverse, it hasn’t happened, and it never will. Effects like that will always be completely hypothetical.”

  Durham said, “Hypothetical? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean the results can’t be considered, can’t be imagined, can’t be argued about. Think of this whole project as … an aid to a thought experiment. A sketch of a proof.”

  “A proof of what?”

  “That Autoverse life could – in theory – be as rich and complex as life on Earth.”

  Maria shook her head. “I can’t prove that. Modeling a few thousand generations of bacterial evolution in a few microenvironments—”

  Durham waved a hand reassuringly. “Don’t worry; I don’t have unrealistic expectations. I said ‘a sketch of a proof’, but maybe even that’s putting it too strongly. I just want … suggestive evidence. I want the best blueprint, the best recipe you can come up with for a world, embedded in the Autoverse, which might eventually develop complex life. A set of results on the short-term evolutionary genetics of the seed organism, plus an outline of an environment in which that organism could, plausibly, evolve into higher forms. It’s impossible to run a planet-sized world. But that’s no reason not to contemplate what such a world would be like – to answer as many questions as can be answered, and to make the whole scenario as concrete as possible. I want you to create a package so thorough, so detailed, that if someone handed it to you out of the blue, it would be enough – not to prove anything – but to persuade you that true biological diversity could arise in the Autoverse.”

  Maria laughed. “I’m already persuaded of that, myself. I just doubt that there could ever be a watertight proof.”

  “Then imagine persuading someone a little more skeptical.”

  “Who exactly did you have in mind? Calvin and his mob?”
<
br />   “If you like.”

  Maria suddenly wondered if Durham was someone she should have known, after all – someone who’d published in other areas of the artificial life scene. Why else would he be concerned with that debate? She should have done a much wider literature search.

  She said, “So what it comes down to is … you want to present the strongest possible case that deterministic systems like the Autoverse can generate a biology as complex as real-world biology – that all the subtleties of real-world physics and quantum indeterminacy aren’t essential. And to deal with the objection that a complex biology might only arise in a complex environment, you want a description of a suitable ‘planet’ that could exist in the Autoverse – if not for the minor inconvenience that the hardware that could run it will almost certainly never be built.”

  “That’s right.”

  Maria hesitated; she didn’t want to argue this bizarre project out of existence, but she could hardly take it on if she wasn’t clear about its goals. “But when it’s all said and done, how much will this really add to the results with A. lamberti?”

  “In one sense, not a lot,” Durham conceded. “As you said, there can never be a proof. Natural selection is natural selection, and you’ve shown that it can happen in the Autoverse; maybe that should be enough. But don’t you think a – carefully designed – thought experiment with an entire planet is a bit more … evocative … than any number of real experiments with Petri dishes? Don’t underestimate the need to appeal to people’s imaginations. Maybe you can see all the consequences of your work, already. Other people might need to have them spelled out explicitly.”